The Diamond Smugglers (Vintage Classics) Read online

  Already a very substantial proportion of the illegal traffic has been diverted into the official channels provided by the Diamond Corporation, but the commercial battle is not likely to be decided within a month or a year.

  Ian Fleming describes how the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone, under the chairmanship of Philip Oppenheimer, has set about its task with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. The Government of Sierra Leone is equally determined to clear out – and keep out – the illegal immigrants from neighbouring French territory who are battening on Sierra Leone. Similarly the thousands of Syrian and European dealers who have acted as middlemen in the past will be obliged to jump off the fence between legality and illegality if they wish to continue either living in or visiting Sierra Leone. The Governor of Sierra Leone recently stated that one dealer alone had sold diamonds to the value of £80,000 to the Diamond Corporation and to the value of £240,000 to the illegal dealers. This man is notorious and it is a pity that his name, like many others, must for the time being be suppressed.

  I will end with two general comments on this book.

  First, Ian Fleming has adopted the convenient literary device of making one individual, myself, the chief and omniscient operator for IDSO, but I should make it quite clear that the IDSO was a team whose success, such as it was, should be credited to Sir Percy Sillitoe and to the Organization as a whole.

  Secondly, I would be the first to admit that our work was by no means completed. Today there are still dotted round the world powerful criminals living beneath a cloak of sunny respectability in an affluence which still comes from diamonds smuggled out of Africa.

  These men will hear of this book and they will read it, out of fear or vanity, to see if their activities have been revealed or their names are mentioned.

  A word of warning to these far from gentle readers. It is most unlikely that the name of any one of them was not on the files of IDSO in London or Johannesburg; and, though IDSO itself has been disbanded, ‘international diamond security’ is not a transient organization, but a permanent function of the police and the Customs men.

  ‘JOHN BLAIZE’

  1

  THE MILLION-CARAT NETWORK

  IF YOU WRITE spy thrillers you are apt to have an interesting postbag. One day in April 1957 I had just answered a letter from an expert in unarmed combat writing from a cover address in Mexico City, and I was thanking a fan in Chile, when my telephone rang.

  It was a friend. He sounded mysterious. ‘You remember that job Sillitoe was on? Well, it’s just finished and his chief operator says he’ll now tell you what it was all about. He’s amused by your books, particularly that diamond-smuggling one. He thinks you’d be able to write his story. He’s ready to tell you everything within reason – names, dates, places. I’ve heard some of it and it’s terrific. But you’d have to meet him in Africa – Tangier probably. Can you get away?’

  I knew something about Sir Percy Sillitoe’s job. When he retired as head of MI5, De Beers had hired him to break the diamond-smuggling racket. Paragraphs about his goings and comings had leaked into the papers from time to time over the last few years. It seemed that the racket had been losing the Diamond Corporation stones worth more than ten million pounds a year. If this unnamed spy would really talk it would obviously be worth sacrificing my Easter holiday. I asked one or two questions. Would these revelations be made with the blessing of De Beers?

  They would not. In that case, were there any security objections to the story being told? My friend was of the opinion that there weren’t. I said I would go.

  My friend gave me the man’s name – John Blaize – which was one of his aliases, and a telephone number, improbably enough in Zululand.

  There followed a week of meetings – with an informative friend from Scotland Yard; in my club with a mild little man from Antwerp – and a flurry of cables with Blaize of Zululand. I had tried telephoning him, but was told that he was out trying to photograph a white rhinoceros – another touch of the bizarre. Then I took off by Air France to the Hotel El Minzah in Tangier, to wait until, on the thirteenth of the month, John Blaize would contact me.

  I had found out what I could about Blaize – public school and Oxford, Bar examinations and then into the office of the Treasury Solicitor. When war came he joined up as a private in a county regiment, but after his commission he was posted to Military Intelligence, where he had done extremely well and ended up as a lieutenant-colonel. After the war he was tempted into MI5 and had been one of the team which eventually broke the Fuchs case. He had then concentrated on penetrating the Communist underground – an unsavoury and sometimes dangerous job which had taken him round the world. In 1954, Sir Percy Sillitoe, one of whose gifts is knowing really good men, enticed him away with a glittering salary to help on the diamond operation.

  After that, for three years, Blaize had gone to earth in Africa, whence his activities had sounded echoes in Beirut, Tangier, Antwerp, Paris, Berlin and even Moscow.

  Now the job was done, the main leaks plugged, the final arrests made, and Blaize was on his way out of the shadows and back into the light of day.

  Blaize duly turned up on time, and we met in my bedroom at the Minzah.

  He was a man of about forty, dressed in the typical uniform of the Englishman abroad – Lovat tweed coat, grey flannel trousers, a dark blue rope-knit sweater, nondescript tie, and rather surprisingly, a fine white silk shirt of which he later confessed he owned twenty-four. He had inconspicuous but attractive good looks. He had dark hair flecked with grey, and shrewd, humorous, slate-coloured eyes that turned up slightly at the corners. His smile was warm and his voice quiet with a hint of hesitation. He spoke always with a diffident authority, and whenever I interrupted he would carefully turn over what I had said before replying.

  When he was consulting his notes, he was a don or a scientist – head thrust forward, shoulders a little stooped and sensitive, quiet hands leafing through his scraps of paper, but when he crossed the room he looked like a cricketer going out to bat: gay, confident, adventurous.

  He was a typical example of the English ‘reluctant hero’, and I got to like him enormously.

  He was tired when he arrived – with a tiredness that came from more than his journey; and shy. He was also rather nervous about being spotted in Tangier, and during the week we worked together he insisted on our meeting at odd places and at odd times. Then he would unburden himself of his story, verifying dates and facts from untidy scraps of paper.

  When he had finished I would get the story down and he would later correct what I had written. It was desperately hard work, but we enjoyed it.

  Blaize didn’t smoke. At our first meeting, after various preliminaries, he stood at the window looking out across the roses and hibiscus in the famous garden of the Minzah towards the crouching clutter of houses that is the Kasbah. He began hesitantly and took time to get into the narrative. This, with a few of my questions and promptings, is how the story went.

  ‘One day early in ’54 my old Chief – he’d just retired – invited me to lunch at his club and asked me if I’d like to leave Military Intelligence and join a team to get after the diamond smugglers. We were to be paid by De Beers – big salaries and all expenses. I was tired of routine and, anyway, the late thirties or early forties are a good time for a man to change his job. Sillitoe was always a good man to work for – he looked after his men and got things done – and from what I had heard of the Oppenheimers and De Beers, they were solid people, too.

  ‘I spent some sleepless nights. This wasn’t going to be as easy or, for that matter, as safe a job as being a Civil Servant – if a fairly exciting Civil Servant. It was going to be rather like going to war again. I said yes, and in August 1954, I sailed for Johannesburg.

  ‘I won’t tell you all the background of the diamond story. But you’ll have to get hold of a few basic facts to understand how the racket started and how it has grown from the old days of IDB – that’s Illicit Diamond Buying – when an occasional native boy on the mineface turned up a stone and put it in his mouth instead of on the conveyor.’

  ‘What was the size of the traffic when you took the job?’

  Blaize shrugged his shoulders. ‘About ten million pounds a year, give or take a million,’ he said. ‘That year the President of Interpol announced that ten million pounds’ worth were being smuggled out of South Africa alone, and that was only one of the sources. But he was rather off the beam about the Union.

  ‘Personally I wouldn’t swear to any figure. Smuggling has grown with the industry. When Cecil Rhodes – he was the first chairman of De Beers, by the way – amalgamated the Kimberley Diamond Mines around 1890, one of the objects was to regulate the working of the diamond deposits and set up a common marketing scheme so that the mines wouldn’t undercut each other. The idea was to create a world price for diamonds – a monopoly price, really, like we’ve heard of in other industries: motor tyres, electric light bulbs, television tubes, and so on. So they set up a buying and selling organization known as “The Diamond Syndicate”. This ran all right until, from the turn of the century onwards, a whole series of fabulous new diamond fields was discovered.’

  Blaize consulted his notes. ‘They found the Premier Mine in 1902 – where the Cullinan and other famous stones came from. Then the South-West Africa alluvial fields in 1908. The Congo deposits in 1913. The Portuguese Angola fields in 1916, the Gold Coast industrial diamond fields in 1919, Lichtenburg in 1926, Namaqualand in 1927. The vast fields in Sierra Leone in 1930 and, last but not least, the famous Williamson Mine in Tanganyika in 1940.

  ‘Early on these new discoveries put a strain on the Rhodes selling machinery, and the Diamond Syndicate more or less collapsed. Half way through the list I have given you, co
nfidence in diamonds disappeared almost overnight. People decided diamonds weren’t rare any more, and prices nosedived, helped by price-cutting between the rival mining companies. It nearly bust the diamond trade. But then De Beers, who must have had terrific guts, stepped in again and stopped the rot. The companies decided it was better to hang together than separately. They joined up again, and the old Rhodes Diamond Syndicate was re-created.

  ‘The lesson of non co-operation had been learned and the new deposits in the second half of my list – and the companies that owned them – toed the line until Williamson came along. He stuck out for a time – he’s a determined, independent character whose biography ought to be written one day – but in the end he came in too, and today about 90 per cent of all the diamonds dug out of the surface of the world are marketed through a subsidiary of De Beers, the Diamond Trading Company – generally known as the Diamond Corporation – in London. It’s as solid as the Pru, and one of London’s great broking services – a huge dollar-earner for Britain, which is why, as you’ll see when I go on with my story, we had no difficulty in getting support from the highest in the land when we needed it.’

  Blaize went back to his notes. ‘For the record,’ he said, ‘these are the companies that have selling contracts with the Diamond Corporation:

  PORTUGUESE WEST AFRICA

  Companhia de Diamantes de Angola

  GOLD COAST

  Consolidated African Selection Trust Limited

  SIERRA LEONE

  Sierra Leone Selection Trust Limited

  FRENCH EQUATORIAL AFRICA

  Société Guiniéenne de Recherches et d’Exploitations Minières

  BELGIAN CONGO

  Société Internationale Forestière et Minière du Congo

  Société Minière du Beceka

  TANGANYIKA

  Williamson Diamonds Limited

  ‘That’s apart, of course, from the Union and South-West African companies owned by De Beers. Much the same machinery exists for industrial stones as opposed to gem stones. These are handled by Industrial Distributors Ltd., of Johannesburg, which is also one of the De Beers group.

  ‘All right, so it looks a nice tidy monopoly picture. And it would be, if there weren’t galloping boom conditions in the diamond industry and if there wasn’t a huge unsatisfied demand for gem diamonds as a hedge against the inflation that’s going on in every country in the world. As for industrial diamonds, these are used for machine tools, and they’re being stockpiled in the armaments race, particularly by America, Russia and China. So the black market price of diamonds has soared in the last ten years, and made almost any risk in thieving and smuggling worth while’ – Blaize smiled grimly – ‘particularly as prison sentences haven’t gone up with the price of diamonds. They’re the same today as they were when Rhodes set up shop in Kimberley.

  ‘The machinery for handling legal diamonds gives no room for alibis. Every month the Diamond Corporation holds “sights” to which the respectable brokers come. There they buy the stones that are up for sale – three million pounds or more at each “sight” and the whole business is as open as the Stock Exchange. But for every honest merchant who is on the Diamond Corporation’s approved list, there are two or three not on the list who are known to accept smuggled diamonds or who are known to be selling diamonds through the Iron Curtain.

  ‘They’ve been blacklisted by the Diamond Corporation. They’ve set up their own machinery in Antwerp and Beirut and other places, and they pay the Diamond Corporation prices, and more at times, for the flood of smuggled stones looking for a market. They’re receivers of stolen goods in a big way, but the countries where they operate don’t care, so long as they take a cut in taxes and import licences and so on, on the way.

  ‘And, anyway, there’s a great deal of jealousy in every country interested in diamonds, not excluding America, because London has this monopoly market in the stones.

  ‘As I said, it’s a huge trade, and immensely valuable. In 1953, for instance, just before I signed on, sales of legitimate stones alone amounted to sixty-one million pounds. They are around seventy million pounds today. But the black market grew with the white, and De Beers simply had to try to cut it down, both as a service to the various countries and companies involved in the Diamond Corporation, as a natural commercial operation against a competitor and – and this is not quite so incidental as you might imagine – as a patriotic duty: to stop this huge gun-running operation through the Iron Curtain, because industrial diamonds are one of the sinews of armaments.

  ‘So you see, it’s gone a long way from the black man slipping a diamond into his mouth and selling it to a pawnbroker in Jo’burg for a few pounds. Today, the IDB operator who buys from the black thief or, more likely, from the respectable European official, can be certain of getting a really good guaranteed price for his stone. Just to give you an idea, the price of a pure blue-white polished gem stone of only one carat has come up from £70 in 1929 to £230 today.

  ‘That’s what’s made the traffic really worthwhile. I remember Sillitoe saying to me that one of the first questions he had asked Sir Ernest Oppenheimer was: “How far up do you want me to go?” You see, there are fortunes involved for everyone all along the legitimate diamond channels right up to the moment when the merchant at the monthly sights nods his head and signs his cheque. Whatever your salary is, you have to be a good man to turn down the chance of picking up twenty thousand pounds or even a hundred thousand pounds at one swoop, particularly since you only face a small prison sentence if you get caught.’

  ‘But surely there must be machinery for stopping that sort of thing – security checks of all sorts, X-rays and so forth?’

  Blaize smiled sourly. ‘You’d think so,’ he said, ‘but when we started on the job we were amazed to find how few white men had to go through security. I suppose it was considered undignified to do much about the whites. A lot of that’s changed now, but you’d be surprised the snags there are even in a check like X-rays.

  ‘You see, you can’t go on X-raying men, even if they’re black, again and again. They get loaded with gamma rays. For instance, in places like Kimberley, where most of the European miners go back to their homes every day, if you X-rayed them every time they left the mine they’d die like flies. All you can do is to have an occasional spot check and make the men think you’re X-raying them when sometimes you’re not.

  ‘We had a couple of bright ideas. First we suggested to the Medical Department of De Beers that an X-ray might be developed powerful enough to show up hidden diamonds but without transmitting too much gamma rays. The company’s top doctors, Van Blommestein and Birt, went to America and Holland and found that a machine could be built which would allow a man to be examined for diamonds up to twice a week. They’re going ahead with that.

  ‘Then I went to an old friend on the Security Staff at Harwell and asked him if one could radio-activate diamonds and trace them with a Geiger counter. He talked to the atom scientists, but they said you couldn’t radio-activate diamonds because they were made of pure carbon. Luckily, the Diamond Research lab. in Jo’burg had been working along the same lines, and they’d invented a way of “labelling” diamonds by painting them with an invisible radio-activated element. This made it possible to plant “labelled” diamonds underground or in the recovery plant to test the honesty of the men. If the labelled diamonds turn up in the day’s production at the sort-house, well and good. But if someone picks one up and tries to smuggle it through the turnstiles, a sort of Geiger counter sets off an alarm bell.